Take the Fall
by mattmetzger
Summary: An 'Alternatives' fic. Spoilers for 1x02 and 1x03. Somewhere, Nick finds the courage to reach for what he really wants, and his future is changed. Nick/Stephen.
1. Chapter 1

**Notes:**

**First in the 'Alternatives' series. The stories aren't connected unless otherwise specified.  
An AU take on the events of 1x02.  
Big spoilers for 1x02.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Primeval, and I am not making any profit with this work.**

**Take the Fall**

**One**

When Nick saw his crumpled form on the grimy floor, his heart rate elevated sharply and he found himself beside the younger man without quite knowing how he got there. He dropped the torch - thankfully not far - and cupped Stephen's head, forcing him to look at him. The sluggish, shivering motions weren't doing anything to alleviate his panic, and Nick had a horrible feeling that he knew what had happened.

He asked anyway: "What happened?"

"A-argument with the bug..." Stephen stammered, before swallowing sharply and adding pointlessly: "Bug won."

And just looking at him, Nick knew what that meant. It was just like the other victim, which meant that Stephen...shit.

"Where is it now?" he demanded. Stephen swallowed again, his Adam's apple bobbing, but he didn't respond, and Nick groaned to himself. "Alright, let's get you out of here."

When he began to move, Stephen shuddered violently and hissed, "Hey."

Nick glanced back at him sharply.

"No feeling in my legs," Stephen explained, but the shivering was getting worse and, honestly, Nick didn't want to hear about the worse symptoms. The fact that he'd been poisoned was bad enough: he didn't need this too.

"Yeah, that's shock," he said firmly, and started to get them moving.

* * *

The wait for the ambulance outside was horrifying. Nick couldn't believe that they hadn't thought about summoning one on standby beforehand. They had _known_ that there was a potentially poisonous prehistoric creature down there, and none of them - himself included - had just stopped for a moment and wondered 'what if...?'

If Stephen died...

They set him down on the pavement, lying him flat down again, trying to keep the circulation - and thus the transportation of the poison - to a minimum. Nick threw his jacket over him and cupped his face again, trying to get him to focus properly.

"Stephen," he said firmly. "Was it the centipede?"

Stephen murmured an affirmative, his eyes beginning to roll in his head.

"God, Stephen!" Nick vaguely heard Abby's cry as they crowded round, but he ignored her, barking out commands instead.

"He's been bitten by the arthropleura. Same wounds, same symptoms as the first controller," he said.

"We need a sample, then," Claudia guessed, and Nick nodded.

"If that thing goes back through the anomaly then Stephen will die," he said emphatically, and he immediately heard the order issued to the soldiers to guard the thing. He knew he needed to be professional right now, but Stephen's trembling and sweat-glossed skin kept him where he was, stroking comforting hands over the younger man's face.

"M'dying?" Stephen queried, but they both knew it wasn't a question.

"We'll get a sample," Nick assured him. "You'll be fine."

Stephen cracked him a faint smile as they heard the sirens approaching. As the vehicle skidded to a halt on the tarmac, Nick nodded to Abby.

"Go with him," he said, and got to his feet. He had to find that creature.

* * *

When, hours later, Nick got the sample of the venom to the doctor, he found Abby sitting in a plastic chair in the corridor outside the ICU, shivering and wearing the jacket he had draped over Stephen earlier.

"How's he doing?" he asked.

"He's unconscious," she mumbled, chewing on her thumbnail. "Delirious. Babbling...oh, nonsense. And then he went into convulsions...they said it was in his nervous system..."

Nick flinched. It could wreak permanent damage there. They could already be too late.

"It's Stephen," he said instead. "He'll be fine. He's hardy."

Abby gave him a tiny smile, but didn't say anything.

They sat in a companionable silence for a while, both ignoring the furore that was probably still going on out there. Nick kept running the scenario over and over in his head. Stephen had seemed like he wanted to tell Nick something, but Nick couldn't imagine what it was. And they didn't know, really, how fast that venom killed something. The wait for ambulance could have meant Stephen's death - hell, Nick turning left instead of right in his little exploration of the tunnels could have caused Stephen's death.

If Stephen died, Nick didn't care how fascinating the anomalies were. He wasn't losing anyone else to palaeontological research. He'd lost Helen after their arguments over her theories, and now he could lose Stephen because of those same theories, though in a different way.

Nick was sick of losing people already.

"He'll be alright," he told Abby again, but it was hollow, and they both knew who he was trying to convince.

* * *

It was two days before the doctor could give them any updates on Stephen. The convulsions had stopped almost immediately after they'd given him the antidote, but he stayed deeply unconscious and unresponsive for two days. Technically, he was comatose, but Nick didn't like to think about that.

In those two days, the anomaly had closed and they had disposed of all the remaining creatures. Which was only two enormous spiders and the carcass of the arthropleura. Nick didn't like killing the creatures, but he'd felt a little vindictive pleasure at that one. If it killed Stephen, then he would kill it. Simple as that.

It was on the second day when Abby called him from the hospital that he was finally able to get news.

"She won't talk to me," Abby said. "She's really insisting on you."

Nick had agreed - Abby was only young, the doctor probably didn't want to give her anything but miraculous news. And even if Stephen was going to be fine, he wasn't exactly going to be leaping out of bed ready for the next adventure. He had excused himself from the meeting he'd been in and hurried over to the hospital.

It was a shock, actually. Stephen had Nick down as his next of kin. The doctor had looked at him a little funny when he'd queried it and asked:

"Do you want to know, or should I call somebody else?"

"No, no, it's just a surprise. How is he? What's going on?"

"He regained consciousness briefly this morning, though he keeps slipping in and out. We had him long enough to run a few tests," she sighed heavily, then said: "There seems to be some partial paralysis."

Nick swore. Loudly.

"We haven't seen this type of venom before - we're lucky the antidote worked, it was for the closest equivalent poison we know of - so we were worried about the lasting effects. We have no idea if it's permanent or temporary either..."

"Where? What's he lost?" Nick managed.

"The left arm is almost completely useless," she said bluntly, "and he couldn't feel his legs at all. His right side, apart from the leg, seems to function well enough, and he can move the entirety of his head, face, neck and chest."

It was a start, Nick supposed. If he'd been entirely paralysed, he wouldn't have been surprised to have walked in there to a request from Stephen to shoot him, then and there. Stephen was such an active man, this was going to crush him.

"Like I said, Mr. Cutter..."

"Professor," Nick corrected automatically, numbly.

"Professor," she said dryly, "we don't know if this is permanent or temporary, and he hasn't been conscious long enough to give us any more of an accurate impression."

"Could he completely regain mobility?"

"We don't know. Once we know more, we'll refer him to the physiotherapy department to regain what he can. I would say that he _could_ regain the use of the arm as the wound heals, but again, don't hold me to that."

Nick nodded, dry-washing his face with his hands, and looked to the door of Stephen's room: "Is he awake now?"

"No, but you could sit with him," she shrugged. "He's asleep now, not comatose. He's just recuperating from the stress of the poisons on the body."

"Thank you," Nick managed, heading for the ward.

"Professor Cutter," she said, "be grateful. Antivenoms are toxic in their own right, and the original poison he was administered by the...whatever...was bad enough. I honestly did not expect him to live this long."

"But he will live."

"He should, yes," she nodded, and let him go.

Stephen was asleep, looking white and ill against the hospital sheets. The gauze that peeked out from under the hospital gown was clean and fresh, but thickly padded and Nick wondered how bad the wound looked now. There was an oxygen mask over the young man's face, but the tremors were gone, and he certainly wasn't having convulsions.

He was...safe. Damaged, but safe. And for the moment, Nick would take that as a blessing.

Of course, he would also probably have to tell Stephen what the doctor had said about his legs and arm.

The biggest problem that Nick was having was that he suspected Stephen had been down there with the intention of protecting _him_. Stephen had a bit of a martyr complex when it came to Nick. Nick remembered, after he had lost Helen, how Stephen had always been there - covering for him at work, making excuses for him, driving him places when Nick had had too much to drink to drive himself, spending the night at Nick's house to look after him after a bad day...

Through the worst of it, Stephen had been there, and now...

Now, he had almost died for Nick.

Nick hoped - prayed, even - that he was totally wrong. Prayed that Stephen had just wanted a look, or that somebody else had ordered him down there. But not that he would be so willing to put himself in harm's way for Nick.

He reached out gingerly and wrapped his fingers around Stephen's right wrist. There was an IV port in his hand, but the wrist seemed safe territory. And he could feel a gentle but steady pulse in the veins there, and it made that knot in his gut loosen a little, to a more bearable level.

It might not be pretty, but Stephen would live.

He gave the wrist a little relieved squeeze and Stephen stirred, fingers clenching the sheets slowly before dulled blue eyes flickered open and met Nick's.

But before either man said a word, a look of horror entered Stephen's eyes and he jerked to stare in disbelief at his left arm.

He knew.

Nick closed his eyes and took a deep breath. They were both going to need all their strength now.


	2. Chapter 2

**Two**

Stephen had taken the news better than Nick had hoped, but he suspected that the other man was in shock. He'd listened to Nick's explanation, then said 'oh' and 'right' a lot, before falling silent for a while. Then he'd wanted details about how the rest of the dealings with the anomaly went.

Nick thought he was hoping he would fall asleep later and wake up totally mobile again.

Still, he'd obliged. He'd sat and told Stephen, in a story-telling detail that Nick usually had little patience for, about how they'd sort-of-inadvertantly-but-really-totally-on-purpose killed the bugger, and Stephen had given him a little laugh then scowled at him for getting bitten on purpose.

"You're an idiot," he'd said.

"What does that make you?" Nick had quipped, and Stephen had rolled his eyes.

Eventually, Stephen had dozed off again and Nick had gone back out into the corridor to find Abby and Connor sitting on the plastic chairs and both looking anxious, but in that way that people do when they're really trying to hide the fact that they feel anxious.

"He's alright?" Abby asked.

"He'll live," Nick said, "but you heard what the doctor said."

He knew Abby would have heard. Even if he and Helen hadn't exactly gotten along in the last year or so of their marriage, Nick did understand women fundamentally (or as much as any man could) and he would have been honestly shocked if Abby _hadn't _listened in. Even most men would have listened in on that kind of thing.

"Bummer," Connor said eventually, letting Nick know that they hadn't been sitting here in silence, and Abby scowled.

"Sympathy is usually longer than one word, Connor," she said, then looked back up at Nick. "Did he wake up?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Did he...?"

"I'm not sure he totally believes this is real yet," Nick said. "He hasn't panicked yet, but I think he was in shock."

"Oh," Abby said again. Then she added: "What's going to happen?"

"I don't know," Nick said.

But really, he did. Stephen would _have _to come off the anomaly project. There were no two ways about that. He'd be killed the moment he came up against another creature. But Nick also knew Stephen, and he knew that the man was going to be stubborn as all hell about it. He would refuse to be pushed out of the loop for any reason bar actually _dying_.

So either Stephen would have to take a backseat role in the entire thing with no chance of seeing a living creature from one of these anomalies - which he would despise - or there was going to be a hell of a fight to regain mobility.

And 'fight' was definitely the right terminology.

* * *

The hospital released Stephen after four days. The doctor hadn't been a hundred percent correct in what Stephen had lost: his left arm was sluggish and the movement badly coordinated, but nowhere near the loss they had originally suspected. But that was pretty much the only improvement.

A wheelchair had been dug up from somewhere, and Nick had already made it known to the others that Stephen would be staying with him.

"For help?" Abby had said.

"Partly," Nick had said, "but mostly because I wouldn't fancy trying to get a wheelchair up three floors to his flat, would you?"

Stephen hadn't looked surprised when Nick had shown up with the wheelchair that morning, but then, Stephen had spent the last couple of days in a permanent state of gloom. He didn't even put up a fuss with Nick bodily lifting him from the bed and into the chair, just stared stupidly at his feet for a moment before leaning back in the seat and making a noise like an angry cat.

"It'll work itself out," Nick said. "Can you feel anything?"

"Right foot," Stephen said. "Can't bloody well move it, though."

"It's a start," Nick pointed out, but Stephen wasn't keen on being optimistic right then, and he didn't say anything.

* * *

There was another advantage to keeping Stephen at his house that Nick hadn't bothered to let the rest of the team in on - and that was that, really, Nick's house was as familiar an environment to Stephen as his own flat. He wouldn't be trying to navigate a new way of moving around in a new place, which would make everything twice as frustrating.

Plus, of course, the guest room had almost turned into Stephen's room in the first two years after Helen had died.

Nick had been to Stephen's flat the previous day and gotten a few armloads of clothes for him, as well as Stephen's 'comfort book'. Most people had a pillow or something they needed on a bad day, or when they were ill, but Stephen had a book. It was an ancient, battered copy of an old evolutionary zoology textbook. Most of the theories had been proven wrong or updated in the fifteen years since it had first been printed, and it was miles below Stephen's academic standard, but it had been the very first book about pre-history that Stephen had ever read, and he'd hung onto it throughout the years.

Nick was pretty sure it was going to get another good going through in the next few weeks.

"You'll have to kip on the fold-out sofa until you're back on your feet," Nick said as he pushed Stephen into the living room and kicked the front door shut behind him. "I got some stuff from your flat and you can commandeer the downstairs bathroom for the moment. Though I got you a new razor."

"There wasn't anything wrong with my old razor," Stephen protested.

"Stephen, that thing couldn't have been capable of cutting bathroom steam, let alone your hair."

"It worked fine," Stephen groused, pulling a face that Nick privately attributed to Stephen inner five-year-old.

"Sure," Nick said, "or maybe you're just facially bald?"

Stephen snorted, and it was such a normal conversation that Nick allowed himself to hope that Stephen wasn't going to be beaten by their situation.

"What about work?" Stephen asked suddenly.

"You're on sick leave for now," Nick said. "Even without the paralysis, you're not over the other side effects yet."

"Like what?"

"Like, for instance, that nurse of yours told me you threw up dinner again last night," Nick said sternly.

Stephen pulled another face, but didn't deny it. "It's _hospital_ food," he said instead.

"And as you're so fond of pointing out, mine's no better."

That much was true. Nick had never been a chef. Or a cook. He wasn't even up to burger-flipping standard. His cooking came out carbonised for ninety percent of the time, or raw and bloody for the other ten. As a student, he'd lived on frozen meals and an exchange with his roommate that he cooked and Nick cleaned. Helen had married him under the strict understanding that if she didn't want them both dead in a week, she took control of the kitchen.

Funnily enough, Helen had always seemed to enjoy that bit. It was the nearest thing to being a normal wife she'd ever been. Except maybe the nagging.

"What are you thinking about?" Stephen asked.

"Helen," Nick responded flatly. After Helen had died - or gone, or whatever it was she seemed to have done - Stephen had become his lifeline. Without Stephen, Nick was sure he would have drunk himself to death in that first year. By this point, there was no point in trying to fob Stephen off. Not only would Stephen see through it, it wasn't something Nick needed to keep to himself anyway.

"Helen...Nick," Stephen said sharply. "She was there."

"What?" Nick said, turning to stare at Stephen. "She was where?"

"Helen was in the tunnels. I swear I saw her. And..." Stephen hesitated, then said: "It's too late now, but she had a message. She wanted you to meet her on the other side of that anomaly."

"She was _there_?" Nick demanded. "After you were bitten?"

"Yeah."

Nick's frown turned into a full-scowl, and then he announced: "So she left you to die."

Stephen wasn't entirely sure why Nick latched on to that rather than the evidence - the real, cold evidence - that Helen was indeed alive.

"Nick..." he began.

"Did she help you?"

"Well, no..."

"So she left you to die," Nick concluded. Then he swore. Loudly.

"Sorry I didn't tell you before," Stephen said.

"Don't be stupid," Nick snapped. "Your life is slightly more important than Helen's games."

Stephen very nearly said 'is it?' but even he realised that that was a suicidal question in front of Nick right now, so he clamped down on the thought and hid it away again.

"God," Nick muttered angrily, then slowly collected himself and shook his head. "Right. Lunch?"

"Takeout," Stephen said quickly - just in case Nick got any other ideas.


	3. Chapter 3

**Three**

The takeout arrived at the same time as a call from Lester - which said, surprisingly succinctly, 'we've got another one'.

"You going to be alright?" Nick asked as he deposited Stephen's half of the takeout on the coffee table for him, within easy reach.

"Yeah," Stephen said. "Food, books, TV. Lots to do."

"Just don't be an idiot," Nick said, "and get some bloody rest at some point. Give me a ring if you need anything."

"Right."

"I mean it," Nick warned, scowling at him, and Stephen gave him that funny half-grin that always made Nick feel doubly affectionate over him.

"Yes, Mum," he quipped. "Get going, or Lester'll eat you and I'll have to call Connor to help me. Which will end up killing me and maiming him, and then the team's down three people, not just one. Get out."

* * *

Nick didn't get back until very late: wet, frustrated, a little angry...and a little proud of himself.

She was really out there. Helen was real and alive and still just as beautiful and magnetic as she'd ever been...and he'd said no. He'd turned her down.

Nick still loved Helen, but not that woman he had seen today. He loved the passionate intellectual that he'd married...not the the extreme that she seemed to be reaching for now.

At the back of his mind through the entire encounter, he realised, had been Stephen's name.

That was what convinced him. She had seen him wounded and dying, and she should have helped him. The Helen Nick loved _would _have helped him. Helen had always liked Stephen; he'd been her student first. Nick remembered when Stephen had first come to the university, fresh back from a long trip in South America.

And he hadn't taken the whole post-trip three weeks dose of his anti-malarials, and had gone down with a nasty dose of South American malaria.

Helen had been _furious _with him. Nick hadn't been too pleased himself, but at the time, Stephen was still in the class of 'nice acquaintance' rather than 'friend' to Nick. But Helen had gone absolutely mad with him, screaming herself hoarse on their one and only visit to the student in the hospital. Nick was fairly sure that she was still banned from the tropical diseases wing, eight years and apparent death notwithstanding.

So for her to cross from that angry concern over Stephen's welfare, to leaving him to die in the dirty underbelly of London...something, somewhere, had gone horrendously wrong.

And Nick had turned her down.

He'd never really - not _really _- said no to Helen before. If she kept up the pressure, he'd always caved, but he'd never so surely and so irretrievably said _no_.

Maybe some good had come of Stephen's poisoning after all.

It was dark now, as he left himself into his house, shedding his coat and boots and running a hand through his slightly sticky hair. Dirty lakewater never did much for hair, even if it did then get a rinse in a clean prehistoric sea.

"Stephen?" he called quietly, flicking on a lamp.

Stephen had migrated from the wheelchair to the sofa, which Nick had folded out into its bed equivalent before he'd even picked Stephen up from the hospital that morning. He was deeply asleep - the fact he hadn't woken at his name being called testified to that - and the lines in his face smoothed out again in sleep.

The remnants of the takeout were on the kitchen table, the counters too high for Stephen to properly reach from the chair, and Nick frowned when he realised that Stephen hadn't eaten very much at all. He made a mental note to force breakfast down him in the morning before binning the remains and ferreting in the fridge for a cold can of beer.

Nick ended up sitting cross-legged on the living room floor watching Stephen breathe and thinking for some time, before deciding that he really needed a shower, some sleep, and preferably some enlightenment on what was really going on.

* * *

When Nick got downstairs the next morning, Stephen was sat up in the sofa bed and watching the news. Nick noted with amusement the stress ball that Stephen was slowly crushing and releasing in his left hand, wondered where it came from, then shrugged it off.

"The hospital physio wants you in this afternoon," he reminded him.

"Yeah," Stephen said, sounding very unenthusiastic.

"You still feeling sick?"

"Not really," he shrugged. "Not hungry, though."

"Nice try," Nick said. "You can be strange and healthy and have toast, or you can have a bacon butty."

There was a short silence, in which they tried a staring contest, but Stephen eventually backed down and plumped for the bacon. If nothing else, it would make him happy for all of twenty seconds.

They ended up sat side by side on the sofa bed, watching the news (muted) and Nick telling Stephen about the underwater anomaly and Helen.

"I don't think she quite knew what to say when I turned her down," he finished.

"I can't say I blame her," Stephen said, and if he didn't have such a masterful poker face, Nick suspected he would be giving him funny looks too. "You never said no to Helen."

"Doesn't mean I didn't want to," Nick shrugged. "She's changed, Stephen. She's not the same woman."

Stephen didn't say anything to that, so Nick changed the subject.

"Where'd the stress ball come from?"

"I've always had one. Got it out again last week."

"Why?"

"We met Connor," Stephen grimaced. "I could sense the impending doom and thought I might need some stress relief."

Nick laughed, which always made Stephen smile a bit.

"How's it going?" he asked.

"Okay," Stephen said. "Bit more finesse than yesterday."

"Any improvement on the legs?"

"No."

"Ah, physio'll get you going," Nick said. "Or I could smack your feet with the remote until you move them?"

"Nah, think I'll pass on that offer," Stephen said. "As I'm not going anywhere for a while, you might as well bring all that overdue marking in from the university. They're going to start thinking we've vanished."

"Stephen, I think you're missing my intentions," Nick said, changing the channel and trying to find something vaguely watchable at eight in the morning. "I'm trying to keep you _alive_, not kill you from boredom."

* * *

Nick left Stephen to the mercy of his physiotherapists to go in to the university and inform the appropriate people that Stephen was on sick leave from now until 'God knows when'. He also finally understood what Stephen meant about that dippy blonde girl in administration having a rather large crush on Stephen, and spent thirty minutes fending off her questions.

He also fetched a load of marking, as Stephen requested, and snuck in some grant request forms in the hope that the younger man would be bored enough to do those too. It was the one point at which their working relationship failed - they _both_ loathed the things, and every year turned into a battle of wills as to who would do them.

He dropped by the flat and threw out the contents of Stephen's fridge that wouldn't keep, transcribed his phone messages, and stole a couple of the more weatherbeaten books off Stephen's shelves.

Nick didn't actually like Stephen's flat very much. It was cold and empty, and far too detached. It reminded Nick of how Stephen had been before he'd got to know him - the appearance that Stephen projected. He knew that Connor wasn't keen on Stephen because of his cool, almost aloof nature, and Nick hated that.

He scowled at the flat before he left, as if blaming it, and slammed the door out of spite.

* * *

Nick's relatively benign mood was destroyed when he got to the hospital to collect Stephen, though. The session had just finished as he walked into the room, and one of the physiotherapists - Julie, Judy, something like that - made a beeline for him.

"He's done well," she said breathlessly, "but he doesn't think so. He seems to be very fit..."

"He ran thirty miles a week before the accident," Nick said.

"Oh," she said, and sighed. "Well, Paul and I are hopeful that we can get him walking properly again, with time, but he's really struggling with this. His arms have visibly improved just with this session - he just needs to practice - but his hips and legs will take longer, and I don't..."

"I'll sort him out," Nick promised. He had a feeling that Stephen wouldn't have liked physiotherapy much.

He got Stephen out of the building and to the car before he stopped the chair and crouched in front of him. Stephen was staring off into space, crushing that stress ball again absently, but he didn't look like he was thinking happy thoughts at all.

"Stephen," Nick called, and he bit his lip when Stephen's blue eyes focused on his. After a second, Stephen's face crumpled in a way that Nick had never seen before, and never wanted to see again, and he sighed, leaning up to hug the younger man and let Stephen press his face into his shoulder.

For the first time in his life, Nick saw - or rather felt - Stephen cry. Even if he hadn't felt the dampness spreading in the shoulder of his T-shirt, the shuddering under his hands would have given Stephen away immediately, and Nick felt like crying himself, all of a sudden. He'd never seen Stephen cry. Stephen's usual method of showing that he was desperately, horribly upset was to hit something - usually his desk - and break a knuckle and make Nick take him to A&E, and bitch the whole way.

But he'd never cried before.

"It'll be alright," Nick promised uselessly, even though he couldn't do a damn thing about the situation. "It'll be alright. You'll get through it, Stephen. We'll get you through it."


	4. Chapter 4

**Four**

Over the next couple of weeks, things much stayed the same. Although even Nick could see the visible progress that Stephen was making, it didn't seem to be fast enough for Stephen.

By the time the weekend rolled around, it was as though nothing had damaged Stephen's upper body at all, but he kept squeezing that stress ball as if he would explode if he didn't. By Tuesday afternoon, he was able to stay standing if Nick or Paul, the physiotherapist, lifted him into a standing position and let go. When Nick woke him up Wednesday morning, Stephen could flex the toes on both feet easily, but still couldn't command enough power to move his legs properly at all.

"Just have some bloody patience," Nick said. "It's like it's wearing off. Like drugs do. If this carries on, you'll be back to normal in no time."

Stephen, though, was not a man made for patience. He never had been. Nick had always been surprised that he had the patience for palaeontology at all, because he certainly didn't in any other aspect of his life. And when it came to having his active lifestyle hampered, what little of Stephen's patience that did exist promptly died.

After the episode outside the hospital, Stephen hadn't shown any real further cracks, but Nick noticed that he seemed...well, depressed. He talked even less than usual, and often he would stare blankly at the news on the telly and show no reaction at all to the stories, even when it was on things that he knew the reality of.

The pain that lanced through Nick's chest at seeing Stephen like that surprised him with its intensity. It was the same pain that had shot through him almost nine years ago when, after one particularly bad row with her, he'd realised that his marriage to Helen was failing. A pain that was somehow sharp and anxious, but dull and defeatist at the same time. An oxymoronic sort of pain.

Nick didn't want to know what that meant, but he had the feeling that he knew anyway.

Nick went in to the university again on Thursday morning, and came back just in time to see Stephen haul himself upright out of the chair, something he had so far refused to try.

"Good," Nick said, coming into the living room and surprising Stephen, who stared at him as if he'd seen a ghost. "Now take a couple of steps."

"I...don't think I can," Stephen said.

"I'll catch you," Nick promised, dumping the two carrier bags of marking. "Now come on. Two steps, and you can have a beer."

"Promise?" Stephen demanded.

"Yeah," Nick said, standing about two feet from Stephen and taking his hands, placing them on Nick's own shoulders and cupped Stephen's elbows reassuringly. "Look, I'll even help. Come on. Two steps."

It took an agonising two minutes, in which Stephen's scowl looked as though he were facing down the gorgonopsid again, and his hands tightened on Nick's shoulders to the point of being painful, before his right knee finally bent and he managed to take a single, wobbly step towards Nick.

Later, Nick would blame the mutual relief at that visible proof that Stephen could do this without Paul and Julie-Judy-whoever. He would blame it on the evidence that Stephen's progress wasn't limited to the physiotherapy rooms. He would accuse the sickly joy in the room of making him take that step of his own, as he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Stephen's cheek.

And the atmosphere froze.

"Shit, sorry, I'm..." Nick began to burble hurriedly, but the sharp squeeze of Stephen's hands on his shoulders shut him up.

"If that's my reward," Stephen said slowly, "then I'd much prefer a proper kiss. That's _real _incentive."

For a long moment, there was silence, as two shades of blue examined each other's faces for a joke, for reality, for something without a name. Eventually, Nick leaned forward again and brushed a second kiss, soft and shy, over Stephen's lips instead.

"You mean one of those?" he asked, his voice a whisper.

"Yeah," Stephen said.

"Well," Nick said, the atmosphere beginning to warm up again, "you have to take the second step if you want another one, don't you? I said two steps."

The second step came maybe a minute later, jerkier than the first, but a longer stride, and Nick's arms slid around Stephen's back to hold him upright.

"Very good," Nick said, beaming. "See? You can do this. I said we'd get through this."

"Mm," Stephen said, clinging to Nick's shoulders. "Where's my second kiss?"

Nick gave it, surer than the previous one, though still with the hesitancy of finding a footing in new territory, then he guided them down onto the sofa bed and frowned at Stephen, unsure of what he was _quite _doing.

"What does this make us?" he asked.

"I don't know," Stephen said frankly. "Whatever you want."

"And if I want you to stay here, even when you're better?" Nick probed.

"Okay," Stephen said.

Nick frowned a bit longer, then leaned down and kissed him again, almost confidently now, and wondering how he'd gotten away with this earth-moving change.

"And if I want more of these, all the time?" he asked, his lips hovering above Stephen's.

"Okay," Stephen said again, and pressed up to kiss him back.

* * *

By the time Nick found out that Helen wasn't, as he thought, still running wild through the past, but now with Lester, being 'asked nice questions in the name of the Queen, Cutter', Stephen didn't need the wheelchair anymore. He point-blank refused to use the cane, though, which meant that Nick had to stick close to him in public, and he wasn't allowed to go anywhere near an anomaly or any animal bigger than a domestic cat until he could run.

Nick suspected that Stephen didn't use the cane because he wanted more of Nick's attention. Honestly, in the sudden eruption of Helen back into his life, Nick welcomed the distraction and the need to be preoccupied with something, even when that care was becoming less and less necessary.

As the paralytic effects of the venom had slowly dropped away, so had the angry red of the wound site. The white scar and the odd dent that it left in the line of Stephen's shoulder caught Nick's eye whenever it could, and reminded him of what he'd nearly lost - or, more to the point, what he'd nearly lost before he'd found the courage to reach for what he'd really _wanted _out of that.

"I hate that scar," he told Stephen after the last ever physiotherapy session, when Stephen stripped off his sweat-soaked shirt and exchanged it for the clean one Nick had brought him.

"I'm not fond of it myself," Stephen said.

Nick pressed a kiss to it before Stephen could get the fresh shirt on, and dodged the swat aimed for his head.

"Are we going to tell the others?" Stephen asked, as he pulled the shirt down.

"Don't care," Nick said. "Up to you."

"Let's see if they figure it out on their own," Stephen mused. "I'd like to see Connor trying to work out something not related to _Star Wars_ or _Jurassic Park_."

"You might be waiting awhile," Nick warned as they headed for the car, Stephen still walking with a very slight limp.

Stephen snorted, grinned, and agreed.

"I might go for a run tonight," he said, looking up into the clear blue sky.

"You can run around like an idiot tomorrow," Nick said. "You've got other things to do tonight."

"Like what?"

"I'm sure you can figure that out."

In the space of two to three weeks, everything had changed for them, and irreversably so. There was no going back now, and as Nick started the engine and watched Stephen stretch his long legs into the space available, he knew he didn't want to go back. This had changed - and would change - everything, and at the same time, everything was the same.

Wherever they ended up, he'd always have Stephen. And now more than ever.

**END**


End file.
